Drop a gem on thick oil, fling a jewel into a gut of jewels

So here is the thing: Brooding diva Mushy, who has darkened our days & made our nights blinding with poems of doom drafted in a crumbling ruin, that Mushy, she has constructed a music compilation from the bottom up. It is called The End of Civilization. Mannequin Label is releasing it in vinyl today.

What is the message in this collection then? If this Civilization is ending, what will replace it, if anything at all?

The diagnosis of the decadence with which the previous cycle ends is vintage cold wave. The technological forces that humanity has foisted upon itself result in an eruption. Beneath the gradient, splendidly UXd façade of cognitive-cultural capitalism coil the same old forces, manifested not just in modern-times alienation (although there’s still a lot of that going), but also enforced idleness numbed by a stroboscopic glare of industrial spectacle, and social platforms for envy, titillation and espionage.

This dystopia is described with bubbling synthesisers, numb romanticism, a broken rebellion of people so young, so cold, so painfully aware of that emptiness inside one, inside others, between one and others.

We cannot tell what is the Shape of the Things that Come After. If Mushy & her coterie know, they are not telling. At best, they reveal the blurry contours of a New Dark Order. The cartography of streets that make their own use of things, streets that spawned gems like Rosemary’s Blind Myself.

The medium is the message is the medium and so forth.

In this instance, the hub where a myriad emotional wormholes in the shape of synthesiser lines that shine like necklaces made of teardrops converge, the framework for a glamorous disco stomper Ida No would have used to kick off the party tonight, if she had grown during the siege of City 17, instead of that dream of New Wave New York its outsiders dream.

In his self/titled 12’’ in Gooiland Elektro, he takes us in a tour through the ghostly airports of quasi-authoritarian countries, penthouses fitted with surgical metal & haute vacuity, the designed euphoria and robotic antics of the fashion disco party. Snapshots of a pyramid that is fascinating and awesome in its artificiality (i.e. its super-humanity), also fragile because it is built atop so much suffering & boredom.

And then there is the Ennui at its apex, an unspoken awareness of how little is at stake, and hence, an obsessive refocusing on the craft through which the unerringly banal McGuffin is delivered. Think of the expectation in the set-up of each of the novels of the Bigend Trilogy, and the disappointment of their resolution.

Exposure is the immaculately produced techno soundtrack for one of those intrigues. A corporate knife fight/Intellectual Property rip-off/product feature leak procedural that could have (or already has, or will have) starred you, design-aware knowledge worker/ free agent of the Creative Economy.

Don’t be fooled by the beige office furniture, tile browsers & nouveau retro tortoiseshell glasses, this is as hardboiled, vicious, virtualised & uncanny as the scenario of any cyberpunk hallucination. People get killed in this place.

The infernal arpeggio kicks in, just as you press *click*, and send that e-mail.